Research – College of Veterinary Medicinehttp://www.vetmed.ufl.edu
UNIVERSITY of FLORIDAThu, 08 Dec 2016 00:17:30 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.1UF scientists identify seal as source of new strain of bacteria that caused disease in hunterhttp://www.vetmed.ufl.edu/2016/07/20/uf-scientists-identify-seal-as-source-of-new-strain-of-bacteria-that-caused-disease-in-hunter/
Wed, 20 Jul 2016 12:33:27 +0000http://vetmed.sites.medinfo.ufl.edu/?p=9958

Dr. Daniel Brown, left, looks on while biological scientist Dina Michael analyzes a sample of a new strain of mycoplasma bacteria believed to have caused disease in an Alaskan hunter. (Photo by Sarah Carey)

By Sarah Carey

A new organism identified by University of Florida researchers could indicate that seals are a potential source for human exposure to the bacteria and could cause more severe disease than previously thought.

The organism, discovered by UF researchers with expertise in mycoplasma bacteria, was identified in tissue samples taken from the hips of a hunter who became deathly ill days after returning home from a subsistence seal hunt. Among his symptoms: high fever, a swollen right middle finger and acute pain in both hips.

In an article that appeared last fall in Clinical Infectious Diseases, the scientists reported that due to the known association between mycoplasma species with “seal finger,” an infection normally restricted to the fingers and hand, the likely cause of the man’s illness was a systemic spread of infection from the middle finger to the hips.

The findings describe what is believed to be the first known case of disseminated seal finger mycoplasmosis, said Dr. Daniel R. Brown, an associate professor of infectious diseases at the UF College of Veterinary Medicine.

“Although we weren’t able to get samples from the finger, the most likely explanation is that the infection traveled from the hunter’s hand to his hips,” Brown said. “It almost certainly had to happen that way.”

Although seal finger mycoplasmosis was first described more than 100 years ago, the manifestation of the disease in this case was unique, researchers said. Brown and his team became involved soon after tissue samples taken after the hunter was admitted to a hospital in Alaska were sent to the University of Washington, where based on general tests, scientists began to suspect mycoplasma infection.

The findings led the hunter’s medical team to delve deeper into their patient’s history, whereupon they learned that one week prior to the onset of symptoms, the hunter had harvested three ringed seals without wearing protective gloves. Additionally, physicians learned that the man had been treated for pain and swelling of a finger after butchering a walrus.

The hunter’s physicians then contacted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where staff aware of UF’s expertise in mycoplasma research and diagnostics put the hunter’s medical group in touch with Brown. Brown’s research team subsequently determined through DNA sequencing of tissue and hip joint fluid samples that the particular strain of mycoplasma they were seeing was unique and resembled strains previously seen in elephants and raccoons, as well as in domestic cats, but never before in seals.

“We’ve known that people can get ‘seal finger’ disease in their hands from hunting seals, but this situation was different as it went systemic and ended up in the hunter’s joints,” Brown said. “Its presumed spread from the patient’s finger to his hips is remarkable because such dissemination is unprecedented in prior reports of seal finger zoonotic mycoplasmal infection of the hand.”

The UF College of Veterinary Medicine houses the world’s largest collection of mycoplasma specimens. Researchers around the globe work through the Brown laboratory to access these samples to study the microbes in hopes of seeking potential remedies for diseases that affect plants, animals and humans.

]]>UF researcher selected as semifinalist in toxicology testing competitionhttp://www.vetmed.ufl.edu/2016/06/01/uf-researcher-selected-as-semifinalist-in-toxicology-testing-competition/
Wed, 01 Jun 2016 15:28:32 +0000http://vetmed.sites.medinfo.ufl.edu/?p=9746Dr. Christopher Vulpe, a professor at the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine, is a semifinalist in a toxicology testing competition sponsored by several federal agencies.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institutes of Health and other groups organized the three-part competition, which will award up to $1 million to improve the relevance and predictability of data generated from chemical screening technology used for toxicology testing. Only a small number of chemicals in use today have enough toxicity data to fully evaluate their potential health risks, and better approaches to evaluate the safety of chemicals are needed, according to the EPA.

Known as the Transform Chemical Testing Challenge, the competition called on innovative thinkers to find new ways of improving current toxicity testing methods. Specifically, participants were charged with developing methods of incorporating metabolic processes into the type of testing now widely used.

Vulpe, a member of the college’s Center for Environmental and Human Toxicology, joined UF’s faculty in 2015 as part of the university’s preeminence initiative. He was selected as a semifinalist in the competition’s first stage, which sought conceptual solutions that could be experimentally implemented and awarded $10,000 prizes to the winners, along with an invitation to continue on to the next stage.

“Our team from UF, working collaboratively with associate professor Michael Fasullo from the State University of New York Polytechnic Institute, is studying the response of immortalized human cells grown in vitro, or in a dish, to chemicals of concern,” Vulpe said.

Immortalized human cells are a population of cells from a multicellular organism which have mutated and are capable of reproducing indefinitely, hence are able to be grown in vitro for prolonged periods of time.

“However, a major problem with most immortalized human cells is reduced or absent metabolic enzymes involved in chemical metabolism,” Vulpe added. “This means that toxicology tests using them may not accurately reflect what could be expected in a person,” he said.

The proposed method makes use of a DNA-editing technology known as clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, or CRISPR, to activate one or more genes for the metabolic enzymes that the cultured cells no longer produce. That allows the cultured cells to begin metabolizing chemicals as they normally would in the body — thus improving the accuracy of the toxicity tests.

“More predictive in vitro tests could also reduce the need for animals in chemical testing,” Vulpe said.

He will compete in the next stage of the competition to develop a prototype system that demonstrates proof of concept.

Dr. Julie Levy holds a dog currently up for adoption at the Alachua County Animal Services facility in Gainesville.

DNA results show that shelter workers are often mistaken when they label a dog as a pit bull, with potentially devastating consequences for the dogs, a new University of Florida study has found.

“Animal shelter staff and veterinarians are frequently expected to guess the breed of dogs based on appearance alone,” said Julie Levy, D.V.M., Ph.D., a professor of shelter medicine at the UF College of Veterinary Medicine and the lead author of a study published recently in The Veterinary Journal.

“Unlike many other things people can’t quite define but ‘know when they see it,’ identification of dogs as pit bulls can trigger an array of negative consequences, from the loss of housing, to being seized by animal control, to the taking of the dog’s life,” she said. “In the high-stakes world of animal shelters, a dog’s life might depend on a potential adopter’s momentary glimpse and assumptions about its suitability as a pet. If the shelter staff has labeled the dog as a pit bull, its chances for adoption automatically go down in many shelters.”

The past few decades have brought an increase in ownership restrictions on breeds including pit bulls and dogs that resemble them. The restrictions are based on assumptions that certain breeds are inherently dangerous, that such dogs can be reliably identified and that the restrictions will improve public safety, the study states.

The study focused on how accurately shelter staff identified dogs believed to be pit bulls. ‘Pit bull’ is not a recognized breed, but a term applied to dogs derived from the heritage breeds American Staffordshire terrier or Staffordshire bull terrier. The purebred American pit bull terrier is also derived from these breeds and is often included in the loose definition of ‘pit bull.’

The research team evaluated breed assessments of 120 dogs made by 16 shelter staff members, including four veterinarians, at four shelters. These staff members all had at least three years of experience working in a shelter environment. The researchers then took blood samples from the dogs, developed DNA profiles for each animal and compared the DNA findings against the staff’s initial assessments.

“We found that different shelter staffers who evaluated the same dogs at the same time had only a moderate level of agreement among themselves,” Levy said. Results of the study also showed that while limitations in available DNA profiles make absolute breed identification problematic, when visual identification was compared with DNA test results, the assessors in the study fared even worse.

Dogs with pit bull heritage breed DNA were identified only 33 to 75 percent of the time, depending on which of the staff members was judging them. Conversely, dogs lacking any genetic evidence of relevant breeds were labeled as pit bull-type dogs from 0 to 48 percent of the time, the researchers reported.

“Essentially we found that the marked lack of agreement observed among shelter staff members in categorizing the breeds of shelter dogs illustrates that reliable inclusion or exclusion of dogs as ‘pit bulls’ is not possible, even by experts,” Levy said. “These results raise difficult questions because shelter workers and veterinarians are expected to determine the breeds of dogs in their facilities on a daily basis.

Additionally, they are often called on as experts as to whether a dog’s breed will trigger confiscation or regulatory action. The stakes for these dogs and their owners are in many cases very high.”
Dog breeds contain many genetic traits and variants, and the behavior of any individual dog is impossible to predict based on possible combinations.

“A dog’s physical appearance cannot tell observers anything about its behavior. Even dogs of similar appearance and the same breed often have diverse behavioral traits in the same way that human siblings often have very different personalities,”Levy said.

Even though most pet dogs are of unknown mixed breeds, there is a natural inclination among pet owners to speculate on what their dog’s breed heritage might be, the authors said.

“This has fueled an entire industry of pet dog DNA analysis,” Levy said. “These tests are fun, but they won’t help predict behavior or health traits. Shelters and veterinary clinics are better off entering ‘mixed breed’ or ‘unknown’ in their records unless the actual pedigrees are available.”

As for legal restrictions on dogs based on their appearance, Levy said public safety would be better served by reducing risk factors for dog bites, such as supervising children, recognizing canine body language, avoiding an unfamiliar dog in its territory, neutering dogs and raising puppies to be social companions.

The study was funded by Maddie’s Fund and the Merial Veterinary Scholars Program and was co-authored by UF veterinary medical student Kimberly Olson and Bo Norby, C.V.M., Ph.D., of Michigan State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine. Also contributing to the research were Michael Crandall, of UF; Jennifer Broadhurst, D.V.M., of the Jacksonville Humane Society; Stephanie Jacks, D.V.M., of Jacksonville Animal Care and Protective Services; Rachel Barton, D.V.M., of Tallahassee Animal Services; and Martha Zimmerman, D.V.M., of Marion County Animal Services.

A longtime University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine faculty member who spent his career working to improve public health, the health of livestock and the lives of veterinary medical students through scholarship support passed away Sunday (Jan. 31) at the age of 83.

Paul Nicoletti, D.V.M., M.S., a professor emeritus of infectious diseases at the college, was a 1956 graduate of the University of Missouri’s College of Veterinary Medicine and received a Master of Science degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1962. He began his career with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Missouri, with later duties in Wisconsin, New York, Mississippi and Florida. Most of his career was spent with the USDA and later at UF, where he taught infectious diseases, epidemiology, public health and food safety for 25 years and influenced many veterinary medical students to consider careers in agriculture and public health.

Nicoletti also served as an epizootiologist in Tehran, Iran, from 1968-1972 with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United States. While with the USDA, Nicoletti made a lasting contribution to Florida agriculture by improving the procedures used to control brucellosis, an important disease that affects both livestock and humans. An internationally renowned authority on this disease, Nicoletti’s efforts led to the eventual eradication of brucellosis in Florida.

He retired from the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine in 2003, after having amassed several important honors and awards for his achievement. Among those were being named Veterinarian of the Year by the Florida Veterinary Medical Association in 1994 and being presented with the college’s Distinguished Service Award in 2003. He received the Meyer-Steele Gold Head Cane Award, the highest award the American Veterinary Epidemiology Society gives, in 2010.

His influence even affected people he’d never met, including a Tampa couple who purchased a ranch in the 1970s as a second career. The couple, the late Bob F. and Evelyn Deriso, willed more than half of their $2 million estate to honor Nicoletti, whom they had learned made a difference in the control of brucellosis. The $1.3 million Deriso gift resulted in the construction of Deriso Hall, the building located across from the UF Large Animal Hospital on Shealy Drive and in which the offices of food animal reproduction and medicine faculty are housed. A room within Deriso Hall was dedicated in Nicoletti’s name in 2012.

A $150 scholarship from Sears-Roebuck and Co. in his youth made a transformative impact on Nicoletti’s life.

“I’m not going to tell you I wouldn’t have gone to college without it, but for a 17-year-old boy who was tired of milking cows, the incentive that scholarship provided truly made a difference,” said Nicoletti in a UF article written in 2013. “It was not just a financial incentive, but a psychological one as well.”

Nicoletti remembered his humble beginnings and paid it forward by establishing three scholarship endowments at the UF College of Veterinary Medicine and one at his alma mater, the University of Missouri.

“I was not the best paid person in my department when I was on the faculty at UF, but have managed well and feel like giving back is important,” he later said. “The University of Florida gave me a job when I needed one and for 26 years I taught at UF and enjoyed the classroom and the students.”

When he retired from UF in 2003, Nicoletti created a scholarship to be awarded to a junior or senior UF veterinary medical student with financial need and who aspired to a career in public health. He subsequently provided funding to endow a second scholarship for students interested in food, animal medicine and reproduction. Since then, more than a dozen scholarships have been awarded.

Thereafter, inspired by former UF President Bernie Machen’s commitment to first-generation college students, Nicoletti pledged $1 million to establish the graduate-level Nicoletti Florida Opportunity Scholarship, which will ultimately benefit veterinary medical students who are the first in their family to attend college.

In early 2015, Nicoletti launched a challenge grant of $100,000 to support the college’s new UF Veterinary Access Scholarship to offset student debt load. Alumni of the college, students and others listened, and by May that goal had been more than met.

“The college has lost a great friend and a tireless advocate,” said James W. Lloyd, D.V.M., Ph.D., a professor and dean of the UF veterinary medical college. “His professional expertise was surpassed only by his kindness, generosity and mentorship to students and colleagues alike. We will miss him greatly.”

A gathering for Nicoletti will be held Saturday, Feb. 6 from 3-5 p.m., with a service beginning at 5 p.m. at Williams-Thomas Funeral Home, located at 404 N. Main St. in Gainesville.

In lieu of flowers, those who wish may make memorials to Office of Development, UF College of Veterinary Medicine, P.O. Box 100125, Gainesville, Florida 32610-00125 or www.uff.ufl.edu/appeals/nicoletti.

Richard Johnson, Ph.D., a professor of anatomy and neuroscience at the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine, has received the college’s top teaching award as well as a UF Research Foundation professorship in recognition of his research accomplishments.

Johnson was selected as the recipient of the Zoetis Distinguished Veterinary Teacher Award, based on numerous criteria, including peer and student evaluations; quality of teaching and impact on student learning; and teaching-related research, service and publishing activities.

A member of the college’s faculty since 1986, Johnson’s primary appointment is in the department of physiological sciences. He holds a joint appointment in the College of Medicine’s department of neuroscience.

“Over my 30 years of teaching veterinary anatomy, I have found that the teaching of anatomy is like teaching a language,” Johnson said. “A veterinary student must learn to write and speak the language of ‘anatomy’ and learn its ‘dialects’ in order to communicate with both clinical colleagues and clients.”

His teaching accomplishments include developing a free-access and interactive large animal gross anatomy website that contains more than 150 digital images, including a self-testing review module for exam preparation.

“I believe in challenging all the students, even those at the top of the class, to learn the material beyond what is comfortable and easy,” said Johnson. “I expect as much engaged effort from the students as they do from me. They inspire me to improve my teaching.”

By incorporating lecture, online learning, interactive small groups, tissue handling, palpation and clinical demonstrations into his anatomy course, Johnson aims to reach students with a variety of learning styles.

Sponsored by the university’s Office of Research, the UF Research Foundation professorships are awarded to faculty members across campus who have a distinguished record of research and a strong research agenda that is likely to lead to continuing distinction in their fields. The honor includes a three-year salary increase of $5,000 and a one-time $3,000 grant for research support. The professorships are funded from the university’s share of royalty and licensing income on UF-generated products.

Thirty-four UF faculty members were selected as UF Research Foundation professors in 2015. All were recommended by their college deans based on nominations from their department chairs, a personal statement and an evaluation of their recent research accomplishments.

For the past 25 years, Johnson’s research has focused on developing experimental models for the study of spinal cord and peripheral nerve injury. He also studies the disruption of neuronal circuits associated with such injuries and their effect on male sexual function, bladder voiding and sensory pathways from the limbs.
“Injury to the spinal cord or peripheral nerve trunks results in a number of complications that seriously affect the quality of life,” Johnson said. “In humans, most of these injuries occur in young men resulting from accidents, sports activities and battlefield deployment.”

Recently published national surveys — including three that Johnson collaborated on — document that paraplegic patients regard regaining normal sexual and bladder functions as their most important recovery goals, even surpassing the ability to walk again.

Johnson and his research team are currently developing new methodologies that will be used to study painful conditions stemming from myalgia and nerve amputation neuromas.

]]>Researchers: Brain changes present in children with sleep disorder, even during wakefulnesshttp://www.vetmed.ufl.edu/2015/05/18/researchers-brain-changes-present-in-children-with-sleep-disorder-even-during-wakefulness/
Mon, 18 May 2015 16:58:47 +0000http://vetmed.sites.medinfo.ufl.edu/?p=8769

Dr. Paul Davenport

Researchers from the University of Florida and the University of Pennsylvania report that children with chronic sleep apnea, who are unable to perceive airway blockages while sleeping, also have trouble sensing breathing problems while awake. This discovery may help scientists find better ways to treat children with this life-threatening problem.

“This means that information about airway occlusion or blockage takes longer to arrive to the cortex in children with obstructive sleep apnea syndrome during wakefulness, compared to children without this condition,” said Ignacio Tapia, M.D., a pediatric pulmonologist at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “Although by definition, this syndrome occurs during sleep, we now objectively know that children with this condition also have sensory processing deficits during wakefulness.”

Individuals with sensory processing deficits are unable to sense a change in their body status, which is a function of the brain.

“Once you have some markers and can see that there is a brain processing difference, you think about possible treatment strategies,” said co-author Paul Davenport, Ph.D., a distinguished professor of physiological sciences at UF’s College of Veterinary Medicine. “This now becomes the foundation for us to ask, can we rehabilitate children with obstructed breathing, and will treatment such as medications, for example, be able to be used at some point to improve or even cure obstructive sleep apnea in children?”

The research made use of a technique Davenport developed in his UF laboratory in the 1980s to study, among other things, how the brains of asthmatic children process respiratory information.

Tapia said he became interested in how children’s brains process respiratory information during his pediatric pulmonary fellowship. He had read an article Davenport published in 2000 relating to how the brains of children with life-threatening asthma respond to breathing stimuli.

“I was blown away by the methods and his findings,” Tapia said. “Basically, he and his team found out that some children with life-threatening asthma have blunted responses to respiratory stimuli and that this could explain their lack of symptoms perception.”

Dr. Ignacio Tapia

Tapia subsequently published research using Davenport’s techniques to demonstrate that children with the syndrome had blunted responses to airway blockages during sleep. The current study, funded by the American Heart Association, enabled Tapia to test his hypothesis that this altered perception of symptoms affected children with the syndrome during wakefulness as well.

A sensory pathway that goes to the cognitive and emotional centers of the brain is activated during airway obstructions, the researchers said.

“If I obstruct your airway, you will feel the effort to breathe immediately because the brain knows the airway has been obstructed,” Davenport said. “When I talk about this, I will say, ‘you can sense your breathing, and in fact, you just did.’”

The scientists also found that after surgical removal of tonsils and adenoids, children with this syndrome improve in their ability to sense airway blockages.

“Obstructive sleep apnea syndrome is a very dangerous condition because it can lead to hypertension, and periods of low oxygen in the brain can result in huge sleep deprivation,” Davenport said. “Adults with this condition tend not to sleep well at night, which causes other consequences as a result of this disturbed sleep, such as depression.”

Tapia and Davenport collaborated in the research, which appeared in February’s Journal of Applied Physiology. Other collaborators in the research included Joseph McDonough, M.S., Jingtao Huang, Ph.D. and Carole Marcus, M.B.B.Ch., all from the Sleep Center at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania; and Paul Gallagher, M.A., and Justine Shults, Ph.D., of UPenn’s Clinical and Translational Research Center.

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The University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine is supported through funding from UF Health and the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

The Journal of Applied Physiology selected this manuscript as the Featured Article for the Feb. 15 edition. In addition, an interview with Tapia about the study is one of the journal’s 2015 Featured Podcasts. The podcast can be found at http://jappl.podbean.com/e/respiratory-cortical-processing-to-inspiratory-resistances-during-wakefulness-in-children-with-the-obstructive-sleep-apnea-syndrome/

Dr. Heather Walden, left, looks on while John Slapcinsky dissects a snail at UF’s Florida Museum of Natural History. (Photo by Mindy Cherisse Miller)

By Sarah Carey

A rare parasite that can cause sickness in humans and animals is present in more species of snails in Florida than previously thought, potentially putting people and pets who eat snails at risk.

University of Florida scientists made the discovery after an orangutan treated at UF died from eating snails carrying the parasite Angiostrongylus cantonensis, known as the rat lungworm. While the rat lungworm is considered established in snail populations in Hawaii, until now it has not been commonly seen in the continental United States. However, the researchers’ findings show the parasite may now be established in South Florida, which raises concerns about how it got there and the potential implications for both animal and human health.

“Determining the geographic distribution of this parasite in Florida is important due to the hazards to human health,” said Heather Walden, Ph.D., an assistant professor of parasitology at UF’s College of Veterinary Medicine and lead author of a study published online this month in the Journal of Parasitology.

The rat lungworm is a nematode that can affect both animals and humans. It uses the rat as a definitive host and gastropods, such as snails, as intermediate hosts.

Florida’s large horticultural industry makes the parasite’s presence in the state particularly disturbing because plant nurseries are one of its most important modes of transport.

“Most of the snails found to be intermediate hosts for this parasite in our study are invasive and some feed on or shelter on ornamental plants, which have the potential for distribution throughout Florida and in other areas of the United States,” Walden said.

Walden’s research builds on a previous UF study, which reported that a 6-year-old orangutan treated at UF in 2012 after exhibiting neurological symptoms was infected with the rat lungworm. The animal had a history of eating snails, Walden said.

In 2013, Walden and a colleague visited the Miami area to collect terrestrial snails from the orangutan’s infection site. They sorted snails by size, shape and color and identified them by species.

The scientists collected mucus from all of the snails and analyzed specimens for the presence of nematodes. Additionally, rat fecal samples were collected from the original infection site and examined for nematodes.

Of five species of terrestrial snails tested, three tested positive for the rat lungworm. One species was the same as the orangutan had ingested, one is a known intermediate host and the other had never previously been identified as an intermediate host, the study states. All of the rat fecal samples contained the nematode.

Walden is working with study co-author John Slapcinsky, an invertebrate zoologist who specializes in the study of mollusks with UF’s Florida Museum of Natural History, to properly identify and process all of the snails collected in this project.

In addition to the danger to humans, the rat lungworm can also affect dogs, horses and birds.

“These species all get similar diseases,” she said. “So these findings are of interest not only to companion animal medicine but to human medicine as well.”

The parasite causes a rare and potentially fatal form of meningitis in people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Walden hopes to broaden her survey to the entire state of Florida and will be working with UF veterinary students in the endeavor.

“Humans can’t become infected with this parasite unless they eat an undercooked or raw snail,” she said. “Some animal species can harbor the infective larvae, like different crustaceans or frogs. As long as food is cooked and you wash your produce, you will most likely never ingest it.”

As for pet owners, “I often tell my students, ‘Don’t let your pets eat lizards or catch mice,’ to avoid potential infection of other parasites. Snails also fall into that group,” Walden said. “If you know you have a snail problem, try to keep your pet away from that area.”

Dr. David Pascual in his laboratory at the UF College of Veterinary Medicine.

By Sarah Carey

The milk-heating process known as pasteurization is routinely used in the United States to kill bacteria in dairy products. Its use has eliminated — or kept at bay — many diseases, including a devastating condition known as brucellosis, which affects both livestock and people.

But in many other countries, particularly those where people live with and are dependent on livestock for survival, pasteurization is not routine and the incidence of brucellosis — which is caused most commonly by eating or drinking unpasteurized dairy products — is much higher, said David Pascual, Ph.D., a professor of mucosal immunology at the University of Florida’s College of Veterinary Medicine.

Pascual and his colleagues are now developing and testing vaccine varieties in cattle with the hope that humans will ultimately benefit as well.

“The concept we are taking is, if we can eradicate this disease from livestock, we can eradicate the disease from humans,” Pascual said. “If we eliminate the animal reservoir, we can help humans.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people most commonly become infected with brucellosis, which causes flu-like symptoms and malaise, by eating or drinking unpasteurized dairy products. Cattle primarily become infected through nasal or oral exposure, as well as through sexual transmission, Pascual said.

“Brucellosis is a global disease,” he said. “This is not a disease with overt symptoms, yet it has been around as long as humans. New infections are occurring at a rate of about half a million people per year, which is believed to be nearly 25-fold underestimated.

“The outcomes of our various studies may give us some idea how the vaccines will work in humans.”

In the U.S., infections in humans, when they do occur, are usually seen in veterinarians or ranchers who manage livestock or inadvertently inject themselves with a live vaccine. But Pascual points out that in the area near Yellowstone National Park that encompasses portions of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, roughly half of the bison are infected with the disease. Moreover, about 60 percent of the elk in that area have been exposed to this pathogen, Pascual said. He added that in addition to dealing with the disease, ranchers and communities are affected by the cost of managing it.

“While there is a vaccine for livestock, it’s only about 70 percent effective, even after revaccination,” he said. “Furthermore, in humans, there is no brucellosis vaccine. The disease causes flu-like symptoms and malaise. Even if you can diagnose the disease early and implement antibiotic treatment, there is no guarantee you’ll be able to eradicate the infection. Since it’s a relapsing infection, one day an infected person might feel fine and the next, they can’t get out of bed.”

“We hope to identify several vaccine candidates,” he said. “Then we will test each in cows to see if they’ll work.”

Because the primary routes of infection in both people and cows are oral and nasal, people put themselves at risk by eating non-pasteurized dairy products. The vaccines are being developed as oral or nasal applications, eliminating needles involved in their administration.

Working closely with Pascual on different aspects of his mucosal immunology research are two scientists who have been with his laboratory for many years, moving with him to UF in 2012 from Montana State University in Bozeman, and a graduate student.

Pascual looks forward to an even greater synergy in immunology research when one of the college’s new eminent hires, Dr. Roy Curtiss, comes on board later this year.